Associate Professor Nina Caputo has retired. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Florida International University. She was the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Penn Humanities Center and a Dorest Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She arrived at the University of Florida to research and teach medieval Jewish history and interfaith relations in medieval Europe. She authored “Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, Messianism” (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and “Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History” (Oxford University Press, 2017), illustrated by Liz Clarke. She also co-edited “Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity” (Cornell University Press, 2014) and, with Mitchell B. Hart, “On the Word of a Jew. Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust” (Indiana University Press, 2019). Since 2003, Nina has been Aassociate graduate coordinator, graduate coordinator, and two times associate chair. She also played crucial roles in UF’s Quest initiative. Based on her long career of service and scholarly accomplishments, the department’s faculty voted to award her emerita status. Nina is moving on to a new opportunity as the Lipton Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin. We have little doubt the center will thrive under her direction.
After more than twenty years in the Department of History, Professor Mitchell B. Hart has retired as professor of history. He arrived at UF after completing his Ph.D. from ULCA in 1994. During his time here he taught courses on modern Jewish history, modern Germany, the history of racial thought and anti-Semitism. He is the author of “Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity” (Stanford University Press, 2000), which won the 2001 Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize, and “The Healthy Jew” (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He edited “Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880-1940” (Brandeis, 2011) and “Jewish Blood: Metaphor and Reality in Jewish History, Religion and Culture” (, 2009). He is co-editor, with Tony Michels, of the “Cambridge History of Judaism, volume 8: The Modern World” (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and “On the Word of a Jew: Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust,” co-edited with Nina Caputo (Indiana University Press, 2019). Based on his long career of service and scholarly accomplishments, the department’s faculty voted to award him emeritus status.
Associate Professor Sheryl Kroen has retired after 30 years at the University of Florida. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, she taught at Pomona College, and then arrived at UF in 1994. She received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the French Government (Chateaubriand Fellowship), the NEH, the Humboldt Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the ACLS Burkhardt, as well as several grants from the University of Florida. In the spring of 2010, she gave 20 seminars on The Recovery as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Vercelli in Italy. She authored “Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830 “(University of California Press, 2000). She provided outstanding leadership for the Cambridge Program and made the Honors Program a model for the entire university. Sheryl served on 78 graduate committees. As a measure of how embedded she was in the intellectual life of this university, those committees included: art history, English, French, mass Communication, music, music history, political science, and romance languages. Based on her long career of service and scholarly accomplishments, the department’s faculty voted to award her emerita status.
Professor Jon Sensbach has retired after 27 years of distinguished service in the Department of History. He arrived at UF after receiving his Ph.D. in 1991 from Duke University and teaching at both the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi. During his career he won prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities twice: first at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and then to research at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of “A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840” (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World” (Harvard University Press, 2005), and is co-author of “A New History of the American South” (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). He was also a co-author of the “Report of the Presidential Task Force on African American and Native American History and the University of Florida” in 2022. Jon’s work re-imagined the meaning of “Early America” and brought the 18th-century Atlantic world to life in dynamic and interdisciplinary ways. During his time at UF, Jon served the department as graduate coordinator and, most recently, as department chair. The department’s faculty voted to award him emeritus status in honor of his many years of service and scholarly achievements.